Amy Rutherford and Damien Atkins in What the Constitution Means to Me. A Soulpepper Theatre & Nightwood Theatre Co-Production, in association with Necessary Angel Theatre Company & Talk is Free Theatre.Soulpepper
Title: What the Constitution Means to Me
Written by: Heidi Schreck
Director: Weyni Mengesha
Actors: Amy Rutherford, Damien Atkins, Gabriella King
Producing Companies: Soulpepper Theatre, Nightwood Theatre, Necessary Angel, Talk is Free
Venue: The Young Centre for the Performing Arts
City: Toronto
Year: Runs to Nov. 10, 2024
Amy Rutherford has strolled up to the stage through the seated house. She’s wearing an optimistic butter-coloured blazer, radiating an appropriately American-feeling confidence and charm. She addresses the audience directly, speaking through a smile.
She’s about to introduce us to her teenaged self, a “pathologically polite” kid who travelled across the United States to cigarette smoke-filled Legion Halls, participating in debate competitions that asked students to illustrate the American Constitution by drawing personal connections to its text.
Rutherford is playing Heidi Schreck, who played herself in the initial run of her Pulitzer and Obie-nominated play What the Constitution Means to Me. The 2017 play was developed with New York’s Clubbed Thumb Theater, and then ran on Broadway and across the United States.
Now, on the cusp of the 2024 American presidential election, a moving, engaging and very funny production of the play is making its Canadian debut in Toronto, guided by the inspired direction of Soulpepper artistic director Weyni Mengesha.
Rutherford resurrects Schreck’s 1986 prize-winning speech and the young self who loved the American Constitution so passionately, she called it “a living, warm-blooded, steamy document” and a “crucible,” which she explains is “a pot in which you put many different ingredients and boil them together until they transform into something else. Something that is sometimes magical.”
At the heart of this work is an interrogation of her young self’s idealized perception of the Constitution as magical. Schreck’s script is unapologetic in its critique, dissecting the Founding Fathers’ discriminatory definitions of human rights, and skewering contemporary lawmakers whose fumbling interpretations have deteriorated protections for all but those who resemble the authors of the original document.
She highlights instances when the Constitution was used to justify violence against women, LGBTQ, Black and Indigenous people. She points to the 2005 case of Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales to illustrate the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, which states, “... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” Schreck recounts how Jessica Gonzales’s estranged husband broke a restraining order, kidnapped and killed their three daughters. When Gonzales sued the Castle Rock Police for failing to protect them, the case reached the Supreme Court, where it was overturned by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruling that while the police “shall” protect the public, it doesn’t mean that they “must.”
Rutherford’s performance is compassionate and sharp, making space for the audience to settle into the emotionally intense aspects of Schreck’s work, and inviting them to consider the effects of constitutional law on real American people.
Supporting Rutherford is Damien Atkins as Mel Yonkin. Yonkin, described as “an incredibly sweet man,” was the real legionnaire who travelled with Heidi Schreck and her family from contest to contest. Atkins’s performance is a quiet, complex, affectionate take on the conventionally masculine Second World War veteran. The Wenatchee, Wash., legion hall, recreated for the stage by Soulpepper’s scenic department, is very much Yonkin’s world.
The wood panelling and rust-coloured furniture, the wall dressed in 36 black-and-white portraits of serious men in army berets, might feel familiar and comforting to audiences who grew up attending Girl Guide meets in similar rooms. The scenery underscores a key truth in the play: the world Schreck inhabits was built by and for the men whose portraits hang on the wall. While she may be invited to engage with, understand and follow their rules, she’s not the one writing them.
In American productions, Schreck ends by debating whether to keep or abolish the Constitution with a high-schooler. In Soulpepper’s adaptation, Rutherford debates Gabriella King, a brilliant 17-year-old with impeccable comedic timing, about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In the performance I saw, the Charter was scrutinized with special focus on the damage caused by the notwithstanding clause, used, for instance, to shield Quebec’s ban on public employees wearing religious symbols like hijabs. The debate is a helpful exercise in dissolving the Canadian smugness that can arise when engaging with American politics.
In Soulpepper’s production, Schreck’s love for the American Constitution is still palpable in the form of hope; having deepened into a call for accountability. The suggestion is that to truly love the Constitution, or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or any document designed to contain the rights of a people, those people deserve a document that supports, protects and loves them back.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)